1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of traffic management, for the scheduling of the movement of plural vehicles. This invention particularly relates to an automated data exchange and fusion system and method, for the optimization of airport surface traffic management. More specifically, the inventive system relates to the management of real-time data generated at different rates, by multiple heterogeneous incompatible data sources, towards the completion of an overall end product or service.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Air traffic, both nationally and internationally, has been increasing significantly and such growth is expected to continue in future years. This increased traffic raises issues relative to airport capacity, surface safety, traffic planning, and surface traffic flow efficiency. Within the United States, many airports are constrained in their ability to expand to meet the need for increased capacity. Most major airports have geographical or environmental/zoning restrictions that prohibit construction of additional runways. Accordingly, added capacity must be achieved through more efficient and safe utilization of existing airport facilities.
Presently, it is the task of the tower ground controller to consider and integrate information from airfield visual cues and a variety of other sources to generate aircraft taxi routings and to configure the airport's taxiways and runways. With the prevalence of hub and spoke airline operations, recurrent departure taxi delays at large airports have become commonplace as large numbers of aircraft attempt to land, taxi to gate, service, taxi to runway, and depart all within 60-90 minute intervals or "banks."
Data transfer between stations in typical U.S. airport tower operations relies upon a combination of voice communications (i.e., radio, telephone) and hand-carried, printed paper strips. Information from non-governmental sources (i.e., from air carriers or ramp management) is not generally available to the tower controller. Similarly, information from the tower controller is not generally available to non-governmental sources. By providing data fusion and automated taxi planning data to the ground controller, he/she can operate with amplified data-gathering and planning abilities. Improved dynamic taxi routing, and hence smoother airport operations with less surface taxi delay, should result. (reference is made to Winter, H. and Nusser, H.-G. (Editors) "Advanced Technologies for Air Traffic Flow Management", Proceedings of an International Seminar Organized by Deutsche Forschungsanstalt fur Luft-und Raumfahrt (DLR), 18 Bonn, Germany, April 1994, pages 191-224.
The largest single component of direct delay cost in the U.S. national airspace system is departure taxi delays, according to the Air Transport Association. The costs of all surface delays are roughly equivalent to all those experienced in other flight control domains (i.e., en-route and the terminal area combined), reported as $1.6 billion in 1995.
Improved airfield surface automation and information sharing has been proposed as a means of potentially improving airport throughput and reducing the losses caused by inefficient taxi and runway queuing. A 1995 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) study estimated the savings due to simple data-sharing alone as an average of one minute of taxi delay saved per flight operation, at congested hub airports. Reference is made to "Cost-Benefit Analysis to add the SMA to the Tower Control Complex (TCCC) as a Planned Product Improvement," Tower Systems Engineering Group, AUA-400/500, Federal Aviation Administration, Washington, D.C., December 1995.
Other benefits of data sharing include better airport resource allocations. Currently, airlines and airport managers are unaware of the precise location of a given arriving or departing aircraft while it is in terminal area airspace (about 60 nautical mile radius). As aircraft are moved into and out of holding patterns and sequenced for arrival, landing-time uncertainties of .+-.10 minutes are commonplace, which in turn adversely affects the efficient allocation of gates, servicing equipment, ground crews, etc. For instance, empty gates may be held for missing arrivals while early-arriving aircraft are left waiting for an available gate.
Several attempts have been proposed to automate traffic control and training systems. Recently, work in surface taxi route planning, using a unified gate-to-takeoff taxi planning and route generation approach, has been implemented and tested in Europe by the German TARMAC system (reference is made to Winter, H. and Nusser, H.-G. (Editors) "Advanced Technologies for Air Traffic Flow Management", Proceedings of an International Seminar Organized by Deutsche Forschungsanstalt fur Luftund Raumfahrt (DLR), Bonn, Germany, April 1994. However, in typical U.S. airport operations, aircraft control is distributed between non-governmental entities (i.e., airline, ramp tower) and governmental entities (i.e., tower) depending on a given aircraft's location. For instance, contrary to non-U.S. airport operations, at U.S. airports, airlines generally have the right to pushback any number of aircraft at any given time without regard for the tower's ability to sequence them. Therefore, in the U.S. case, the latitude for pure taxi route optimization is severely constrained compared to Europe and elsewhere, leading to significantly different expectations for data exchange systems.
The article by Meuninck, T. C., titled "Finding the Pulse of the ATC System Heartbeat: A Joint Atlanta Airport/Local FAA/Aviation Users Adventure", Journal of ATC, January-March 1995, pages 28, 29, provides a general description of a test conducted at the Atlanta Airport for managing and measuring the performance of an ATC system. However, the article provides limited implementation design, and the system as actually designed did not provide a comprehensive solution to the control and management of a large number of aircraft from various carriers, nor discernible sharing of data between different domains of control.
The report by Talley, R. G. and Cistone, J. A., "ASTA Traffic Planner System Description", Report 4J50-AHD-D001, Martin Marietta Corporation, Management and Data Systems, December 1993, describes early systems requirements for a ground movement optimization system at airports.
The article by Davis, T. J., Krzeczowski, K. J., and Bergh, C., "The Final Approach Spacing Tool," 13th IFAC Symposium on Automatic Control in Aerospace, Palo Alto, Calif., September 1994, describes a system for assisting terminal area air traffic controllers in the management and control of arrival traffic.
The report by Skaliotis, G. J., "An Independent Survey of AMASS/ASTA Benefits," Report RSPA/VNTSC-FA2P8-PM1, Surveillance and Sensors Division, Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, Cambridge, Mass., December 1991, describes a safety detection system for runways, focused mostly on minimizing runway incursions.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,216,611 to McElreath describes an integrated enroute and approach guidance system for aircraft. The guidance system uses data from long range aids such as the global positioning system (GPS) and an inertial navigation system (INS) and short range aids such as a microwave landing system (MLS), to modify and automatically transition an aircraft from the long range aids to the short range aids.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,574,648 to Pilley describes an airport control/management system for controlling and managing the surface and airborne movement of vehicular and aircraft within a defined and selected airport space envelope. The system establishes a three-dimensional digital map of the airport space envelope, with the map containing GNSS positioning system reference points. A computer superimposes a three-dimensional image corresponding to a path of the aircraft onto the three-dimensional map, and generates airport control and management signals as a function of the aircraft path, the computer programming, and the path to a desired apparent line of observation, in order to control the traffic in the airport.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,623,413 to Matheson et al. describes a scheduling system for moving freight trains through a multipath system that assists in the automatic control of the movement of trains through the system. The system includes a planner that is responsible for overall system planning in allocating the various resources of the system to meet the orders or demands on the system in an optimal manner. The system develops a coarse schedule for the use of the various resources and passes this schedule to a planner/dispatcher. The planner/dispatcher receives the coarse schedule from the planner and determines a detailed scheduler of the resources termed movement plan. The movement plant is then transmitted to the train controller on board the locomotive in the trains being controlled. A safety insurer may check the movement plan, and the planner may generate appropriate command signals for the various track elements to configure the railway system as needed to carry out the movement plan.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,979,137 to Gerstenfeld et al. describes an air traffic control training system. The system interacts with a user by generating a representation of at least one moving aircraft having an initial moving position and heading, for producing a dynamic simulation of an air traffic scenario. Controller commands issued by a user are entered for altering the air traffic scenario. Rules and procedures stored in a database are compared to the present state of the simulation of the air traffic scenario or to the controller command by an expert system for issuing a warning upon the immediate or foreseeable failure to observe any rule or procedure in the database.
However, none of the foregoing or other traffic control and training systems considers the control and management of a broad, system-wide context, and provides a discernible sharing of data between different domains of control.